Report: Special Counsel Prepared Their Own Summaries Of Mueller Report

The special counsel prepared summaries of the Mueller report so that they could be released publicly immediately.

When Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted the final report on Russian influence in the 2016 election and investigations into President Trump's alleged obstructions of justice, each section contained its own summary so that the findings of the nearly 400-page report could be succinctly—but accurately—reported.

According to The Week, a U.S. official told The Washington Post that officials wrote the summaries with the belief that they would be accessible to the public. As a result, members of Mueller's team have expressed frustration with Attorney General William Barr's failure to deliver the prepared summaries to Congress. Instead, he wrote a four-page letter to Congress in his own words.

"There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead," the official who wished to remain anonymous told the newspaper. The team wrote the summaries in "a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself."

While Bar's letter concluded that Mueller failed to find sufficient evidence that Trump was involved in any illegal activities, investigators found the evidence to be "alarming and significant," the Post reports. No such evidence was mentioned in Barr's four-page letter to Congress.